Don’t be BORING – decorate your sneakers and celebrate the sunshine!

Don’t be boring! Actually that’s one word my girls know we don’t ever use in our family . . . . “boring.” There is so much to do, to experience, to learn, to create, that we can always find something that will make our lives so much more FUN! So, while I was waiting for the glue to dry on my art journal covers and pages, I decided to try something different. I had a pair of plain ol’ white tennis shoes / sneakers with “boring” white laces and I had a drawer full of acrylic craft paint in my studio.

I got to wondering if I could paint those plain ol’ “boring” white sneakers and make them bright and cheerful and pretty for summer – since it is almost summer and even though the weather has been rather fickle the past few weeks, it seems that it has finally decided that it is no longer appropriate to be gray, gloomy, wet, cold, and miserable. It is time for sunshine and blue skies, and it is time to get those gardens ready.

This past weekend we were able to get outside and clean up several of the garden areas around our house AND we got a new mailbox. I know, I’m easily entertained, but we really needed a new mailbox. The one that was here when we bought this house two years ago was really cute. It was a sweet little house with a brown roof, and windows, and a front door where the mail lady could open it up and pop in our mail every day. But I’m thinking it was build in 1973 or somewhere along that time because it was getting faded, and shabby, and the post was getting pretty wobbly.

So sweet hubby worked on digging that post out of the ground for quite some time – finally had to hitch a strap around it and pull it out with the truck because the cement that the rotting post was sitting in was buried way down in the ground. I’m not sure that anyone steals mailboxes, but who knows – there were other things around here that were bolted down and buried in the ground with concrete anchors attached. Makes it challenging to replace the old stuff when you need to, but we finally managed to get the old stuff removed and we replaced it with a simple black mailbox on a post that is somewhat decorative but actually quite elegant. Even though we are not exactly “elegant” people and our house is not “elegant” at all, our mailbox is certainly much nicer than it was before.

Between working outside cleaning up the gardens and hauling away the old mailbox debris, I had to come inside every once in a while because I don’t do well working out in the sun for very long periods of time – even so I did get a bit of a sunburn, but it’s not too bad. While I was inside to escape from the sun, I was able to experiment with painting my sneakers. I’m sure my family wondered what I was doing at first – well, maybe not because they know I’m always doing something unusual – but my girls were quite intrigued with the process of painting and then decorating those plain ol’ white sneakers.

I painted the first pair of sneakers blue, and then I painted two flowers on each shoe. One flower on the outer front side and one smaller flower on the outer heel. Then I added a bit of greenery, stems, vines, and leaves. That seemed kind of “boring” to me, but I asked some of my FB friends and everyone really liked them with just two flowers on each shoe. Well, except for my friend Catherine who commented, “Why DO, when you can OVERDO???” So that was all the encouragement I needed to get busy on the next pair of painted sneakers.

My “fashion diva” 16-year-old daughter declared, “Mom, you need to do a pair in peach with purple flowers all over!” OK so I did. Then she decided that I should paint another pair of sneakers purple . . . she didn’t care what color flowers, so I went with yellow. Speaking of yellow, why not paint a pair of “boring” white sneakers yellow – and add tiny blue flowers all over with vines, leaves, and stems in the “empty” spaces?

Now I never have to “waste” time waiting for the glue or paint to dry on any of my projects . . . I’ll just start another project, and while I’m waiting for the paint to dry on THAT project, I’ll go back to the first one and keep on “making stuff” that way so I never run out of things to do and life will never be “boring” around our house! If you would like to try painting your own plain ol’ white sneakers, I’ll be posting a tutorial later this week. Be watching because you never know what I’ll come up with here at Vintage Mama’s Cottage, but you know it will be a lot of fun!

PS if you don’t have the time to paint your own sneakers, you can always order them from my Etsy shop, Tatters to Treasures. I’ll be listing more pretty painted sneakers over the next few days so check out my fun, whimsical, and sunny hand-painted sneakers.